'Men of Mathematics 2' by E. T. Bell

You may not know it but we deal with maths everyday.  Reading this blog, for instance, requires maths for the algorithms that has lead you here and for the computer/ phone/ tablet to be made enabling such reading.  Yet the stories of the men who have pushed the boundaries of the subject that has transformed our world are not popularly known.  In comes E. T. Bell with 'Men of Mathematics 2' a book of short biographies of the major mathematicians from 1793 to 1918.

I read this book as folk tales of extraordinary people who set their minds to understanding the world through the application of mathematics, full of misfortune, humour and world changing discoveries.  Take Evariste Galois: a boy with a 'madness for maths' failed in his examinations due to the stupidity of his examiners, or as one put it 'A candidate of superior intelligence is lost with an examiner of inferior intelligence'. 

 He lived during the Revolution of 1830 and at a gathering of revolutionaries he stood up with a glass in one hand and a pocket knife in the other and declared 'To Louis Philippe'- the King whereupon the next day he was thrown in prison.  He died aged twenty-one and helped lay the foundation for quantum mechanics.  See, it's not all chalkboards and compasses.

 

Poincare said that 'Mathematical discoveries, small or great...are never born of spontaneous generation.  They always presuppose a soil seeded with preliminary knowledge and well prepared by labour, both conscious and unconscious' and this is what you feel from reading such a book, that the journey is ever continuing and one mathematician takes off from where another leaves.  There is no greatness without learning from the past.  The fact that it is not a solidary pursuit always starting from scratch speaks to how many different things were needed from many people in order to gain the knowledge we have now. 

Mathematics doesn't even have to be approached as a science.  Take Kronecker who 'was an artist who used mathematical formulae as his medium'.  It takes intense creativity to develop the insights needed to proceed and a love of abstract thinking that is like wordplay to numbers.  It's given me a much deeper appreciation of a neglected subject that should be more a part of popular culture.  

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